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Let’s check out five book club picks for July 2022!
I hope you’re having a great reading month so far! I’ve recently read two celebrity book club picks: More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez (GMA June Pick) and Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen (Reese’s June Pick). Both are fantastic. I plan to read Emily Giffin’s Meant to Be next.
I’m sure your book club will start to plan out what to read in July very soon. So I put together a list of five selections: three newer releases and two previously released novels. As always, the older novels include my original book club questions so you’ll be all set with those.
BTW, if you’re looking for more summer read recommendations, check out my summer list here.
Let’s get to the July list!
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
An Oprah book club selection, Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley just hit the New York Times bestsellers list. It sounds like a fantastic work of fiction. The story follows a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. Here’s the synopsis:
Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison.
But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
You can order the book on Amazon here.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Some people have called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin their favorite novel so far of 2022. So I think this is a must-read for sure! The story is about two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. This story publishes on July 5. Here’s the synopsis:
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
You can order the book on Amazon here.
Reputation by Sarah Vaughan
Another novel publishing in early July is Reputation by Sarah Vaughan. She’s the bestselling author of Anatomy of a Scandal, which is now a Netflix series. I think Reputation sounds so intriguing as well. This is a psychological thriller about a politician whose less-than-perfect personal life is thrust into the spotlight when a body is discovered in her home. It’s been a while since I’ve read a true thriller and this promises to be an exciting one. Here’s the synopsis:
As a politician, Emma has sacrificed a great deal for her career—including her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, Flora.
A former teacher, the glare of the spotlight is unnerving for Emma, particularly when it leads to countless insults, threats, and trolling as she tries to work in the public eye. As a woman, she knows her reputation is worth its weight in gold but as a politician, she discovers it only takes one slip-up to destroy it completely.
Fourteen-year-old Flora is learning the same hard lessons at school as she encounters heartless bullying. When another teenager takes her own life, Emma lobbies for a new law to protect women and girls from the effects of online abuse. Now, Emma and Flora find their personal lives uncomfortably intersected…but then the unthinkable happens.
A man is found dead in Emma’s home. A man she had every reason to be afraid of and to want gone. Fighting to protect her reputation, and determined to protect her family at all costs, Emma is pushed to the limits as the worst happens and her life is torn apart.
Another breathless and twisty novel from an absolute “master of suspense” (CrimeReads), Reputation brilliantly illustrates that it isn’t who you are that matters…it’s who people think you are.
You can order the book on Amazon here.
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
If you’re looking for more of a breezy, summer read, I highly recommend People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry. It’s an entertaining, slow-burn romance. Here’s the synopsis:
Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.
Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.
Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.
Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
You can order the book on Amazon here. Check out my book club questions here.
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
Fiction centered around female friendships is always compelling. And a truly heart-wrenching one is Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. You might have seen the Netflix adaptation, which is actually quite different from the novel in many ways. But I do think they complement each other well. Here’s the synopsis:
In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the “coolest girl in the world” moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all—beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer’s end they’ve become TullyandKate. Inseparable.
So begins Kristin Hannah’s magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives.
From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness.
Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn’t know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she’ll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she’ll envy her famous best friend. . . .
For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship—jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they’ve survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.
You can order the book on Amazon here. Check out my book club questions here.
Happy reading!
